Finally. Finally. The Hirana was speaking to her once more. The response the Hirana had given her when she was on its surface had been the rumblings of a thing asleep. This was a wakeful voice. Just a whisper, a nudge, but it was enough.
Meena moved. She took slow, reluctant footsteps back, back, as Priya nudged her with the stick toward the edge of the triveni’s surface, where it melded into the Hirana’s pockmarked, death-riddled stone. Meena stopped when her heels touched upon the edge.
They stared at one another. The rain fell.
“Please,” Meena whispered.
“Who is he?” Priya’s hands were damp with sweat and rain. She could hear shouting, somewhere, drawing closer. “Who was the temple son who gave you a taste of the deathless waters? Who condemned you to die?”
Priya could not see Meena’s expression through the mask. But she felt it, when Meena broke free from her shocked stupor; when Meena shoved forward, Gauri’s stick bending between them, a fierce cry escaping her throat as she tried once more to get her hands around Priya’s throat.
Priya dropped the stick and grabbed Meena by the front of her blouse. The rage that took her then was all-consuming. How dare she.
“The Hirana won’t spare you,” she said savagely. “You’re not worthy.”
And then she shoved Meena hard with both hands.
Meena fell without another sound.
Priya stood frozen, her hands still outstretched before her. She sucked in a breath. Another. The sheer rage that had taken her left her abruptly. Her hands began to shake.
Oh, spirits. What had she done? What had just happened? Her heart was still racing, but she couldn’t feel her limbs.
She lowered her hands. Turned.
The prisoner stood in the entrance of the northern chamber. Watching her.
The prisoner—the princess—was taller than Priya had thought she would be. And thinner. It was absurd, to think that now, when Priya’s life was finished; when she had murdered another woman in front of the emperor’s sister and spoken of the deathless waters. But the princess was tall and gaunt, and although her eyes were still red, she stood utterly still, unblinking, her mouth a smooth, unreadable line. She looked entirely unafraid.
Had the princess seen what she’d done? Heard what she’d said? The princess didn’t look as if she thought Priya would kill her, and wildly for a moment, Priya wondered if she should. No one could know what she was. But she was shaking, she couldn’t, she didn’t want to.
The guards rushed in, the maidservants at their back. Pramila strode after them, a naked blade in her hands.
“Princess Malini!”
Priya’s vision was still singed black. She could not think. She could not breathe. Ah, spirits above and below, Priya knew what they all saw, and how damning it was: the walls marked with blood. Priya, a lowly maidservant, bleeding. The princess. The princess…
“Pramila,” the princess gasped. Priya watched in numb surprise as the princess’s face crumpled with tears, her cheeks suddenly blotchy. The princess grabbed ineffectually at the edges of her shawl, as if trying to draw it up to her face, to protect herself from the eyes of the male guards, who stood and gawped, their weapons drawn. But she dropped the shawl, over and over again. Her hand was shaking. Then her teeth began to chatter, as if shock had overcome her. The princess leaned back against the door. “Pramila, ah!”
Lady Pramila dropped the blade and raced to her side, clasping the princess by the arms. “You there,” she snapped at one guard. “Restrain that servant. Now.”
A guard strode across the room, grabbing Priya brutally by the arm. Priya bit the inside of her cheek. She did not look at Gauri or Sima. She would not show how afraid she was.
“She saved my life,” the princess gasped. She was looking at Pramila, blinking rapidly, her expression terrified and open. “That maid—she saved me. There was an assassin and she risked herself for my sake and I—ah, Pramila, I cannot breathe! I cannot breathe!”
The princess collapsed in Lady Pramila’s arms. For all her thinness, her weight dragged Pramila down with her. And Priya could only stare openmouthed as everyone rushed to help the princess. As the guard’s hand loosened upon her arm, softened by the lie.
ASHOK
The sound of the rain drew Ashok back into his skin. He heard it drum with a hundred thousand fingertips against the soil. He heard it beat a low, hollow song against the wood that surrounded him. He breathed deep and slow, a breath that was like the winding and unwinding of a coil of rope, and knew that it had been raining for some time, and that it was not the sound of the rain alone that had brought him back. He could feel a strange pain along the vertebrae of his spine; there was a heaviness in his throat and his eyes, a threat of grief he wouldn’t allow himself to fulfill. No tears. A man did not weep.